{"title":"We Are True Whigs","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0009","url":null,"abstract":"Black Rhode Islanders were disfranchised with little fanfare in 1822 but regained the vote in 1842, in the context of the Dorr War, an all-white armed insurgency to overturn the state government based on a sharply restricted franchise. Having defeated the insurgents, the “Law and Order” government (future Whigs) instituted a property requirement for naturalized voters, mainly Irish, and opened the franchise to African Americans, who had helped suppress the Dorrites. From then through the Civil War, led by party operatives like William J. Brown, black voters operated as a submachine, a balance of power keeping the Whigs and their conservative Republican successors in control of the state. In the later 1850s, however, the wealthy New York hotelier George T. Downing moved to Newport and organized a fierce but unsuccessful campaign for school integration, roiling the black community.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134361827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ohio, Flanked","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0016","url":null,"abstract":"The schizophrenic nature of Ohio’s politics was represented by two Ohio Republican congressmen in early 1861: the “Corwin amendment” to the Constitution, proposed by the eminent Thomas Corwin, guaranteed slavery’s legality in perpetuity so as to forestall civil war; a bill by James Ashley mandated compensated emancipation for any enslaved person escaping to a free state. Meanwhile, former Governor Salmon P. Chase, widely identified with bringing black men into the Republican Party, joined Lincoln’s cabinet as Secretary of the Treasury.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"147 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116381514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Losing and Winning in the Empire State","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"This brief conclusion traces the continuity of black politics after the Civil War, when the redoubtable veteran Stephen Myers continued leading the state’s black Republicans, finally winning a federal patronage position before his death in 1869, when the eminent Thurlow Weed led the state’s leadership in mourning his passing.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"90 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129654918","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Citizens for Protection","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Philadelphia contained the early republic’s largest population of free people of color, described as “the elite of our people” by other African Americans. Led by the wealthy sailmaker James Forten and Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the AME Church, they practiced “shadow politics,” building their own institutions separate from white society, protected by powerful whites in the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. Despite their legal right to vote, however, they also accepted their de facto exclusion from party and electoral politics. This politics of deference in return for protection left black Philadelphians defenceless against white violence and disfranchisement in the 1830s, after which they retreated into a closed world of ritual and small-scale factional disputes.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"145 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116193348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Very Sebastopol of Niggerdom","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"New Bedford was the U.S.’s wealthiest city in the U.S., notorious nationally for its visible Black power. Its powerful Quakers patronized black leaders like Nathan Johnson, mentor to a young Frederick Douglass on his 1838 arrival. By then, black Bedforders had established a robust independent politics, forcing all parties to compete for their votes. In the 1840s, younger men like the brothers Ezra and Richard P. Johnson helped lead the local Liberty Party (and later the Free Soil and Free Democratic parties), fighting the dominant Whigs for African American votes. From 1848 through 1854, the black electorate joined a radical biracial coalition led by renegade Democrat Rodney French, Mayor in 1853-54. After 1855, Republicans incorporated black men into party and municipal offices.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122497301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0017","url":null,"abstract":"From 1861 to 1865, the black political leadership was subsumed into the war to defeat the slaveholding Confederacy, led by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. Their greatest achievement was through the United States Colored Troops, which played a major role in the Union victory.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"50 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130642883","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Pennsylvania Default","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"This conclusion to Part One describes how the rise of temperance politics among black Philadelphians led to massive white violence and even more withdrawal by that city’s black leaders. Pittsburgh’s African Americans, led by Martin Delany continued to act politically even after disfranchisement, attempting to organize state conventions, only to be thwarted by Philadelphians. Ultimately, in the 1850s, black Pennsylvanians acted outside of electoral politics to reclaim some agency in fighting off slavecatchers in places in Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, and many smaller sites.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131733161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"We Do Not Care How Black He Is","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"Ohio’s 1802 constitution disfranchised black men, and a series of Black Laws passed soon after sharply regulated the legal status of African Americans. But an 1831 state supreme court decision, Polly Gray v. Ohio, established that anyone who could claim he or she was “preponderantly white” was legally white, and could vote if male. Beginning in the late 1830s, black men began pressing to overturn the Black Laws, and voted, aided by white allies like the attorney Salmon P. Chase, founder of the state’s Liberty Party, and the Whig congressman Joshua Giddings. By the 1850s, they were voting in large numbers, led by the lawyer John Mercer Langston, and helped elect Chase, now head of the Republican Party, as governor.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"40 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126536081","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The New England Impasse","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0010","url":null,"abstract":"By the mid-1850s, black activists had achieved a striking level of political power in New England. In Massachusetts, led by leaders like the lawyer Robert Morris and the physician John S. Rock, they supported the firmly anti-slavery American Party (or Know-Nothings), which sent the radical Henry Wilson to the U.S. Senate. The militant fugitive Lewis Hayden became famous for his defiance of slave-catchers, and was appointed to a State House position by Governor John Andrew. The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision led to the convening of a Massachusetts state convention and then a regional meeting to consider how to pressure Republicans.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133548339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Consult the Genius of Expediency Approaching Power, 1847–1860","authors":"Van Gosse","doi":"10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469660103.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"In the late 1840s, the focus of New York’s black politics shifted to the philanthropist Gerrit Smith’s plan to award freeholds in upstate counties to 3,000 black men, making them both independent farmers and voters. Although the “Smith Lands” project did not succeed, evidence suggests many used their deeds to gain the vote in New York and Brooklyn, and in 1849-1850 they were credited with giving the state to the Whigs. In the 1850s, the suffrage campaign revived as the state shifted left. Republicans in the legislature repeatedly voted for non-racial suffrage, and Stephen Myers led a State Suffrage Association in tandem with Thurlow Weed’s Republican machine. An 1860 referendum on non-racial suffrage again produced defeat, but the number backing equal suffrage increased substantially.","PeriodicalId":367801,"journal":{"name":"The First Reconstruction","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115551666","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}